Bitrix24 launches free inter-company collaboration tool

Since its launch in April 2012, Bitrix24 has become one of the fastest growing online collaboration platforms, used by more than 180,000 companies.

It's now launching a new, free instant collaboration tool called Bitrix24.Network, allowing companies to work together without leaving their familiar corporate portal.

"Internal communications have been revolutionized by social intranets and enterprise social networks in the recent years. Intra-company communications, however, are still in the twentieth century, done mostly via emails. Our network fixes that," says Bitrix Inc president Dmitry Valyanov.

The new product is connected to, but is independent of, Bitrix24 itself and it allows people from different corporate intranets to communicate and collaborate in the same way they do inside their own company intranet.

It allows users to create temporary collaboration work spaces that are similar to throw away email addresses. Send a link to people you need to collaborate with, they log in with their Facebook or Twitter accounts and you start collaborating immediately. Once the task is over you have the option to abandon the collaboration space or keep using it for future projects. The service is free for all parties involved.

Currently Bitrix24.Network supports unlimited instant messaging, private and group chats, audio and video calls free of charge. File sharing, online document editing and other tools already available in Bitrix24 will be added to the network in the coming months.

New features are being added to the main Bitrix24 product too. There's now an email server inside Bitrix24 accounts, thanks to partnership with Yandex. Duplicate search and quotes have been added to the CRM module and the mobile app now supports extranet users.

Valyanov says, "We never believed that email is dead. Yes, social communications are effectively replacing email inside the company, but in order for a collaboration solution to be 'whole', you need to have social, chat, audio, video, telephony and email in one place. The addition of mail server inside Bitrix24 effectively completes the collaboration circle that we envisioned when we launched the service two years ago. We can now concentrate on polishing the existing tools and developing Bitrix24.Network, because it’s obvious that the next revolution is about how companies communicate with each other".